BASINGSTOKE, UK -- October 2nd, 2018 – Omnitek today announced immediate availability of the highest performance CNN on an FPGA, achieving over 50% higher performance than any competing CNNs and out-performing GPUs for a given power or cost budget. The Omnitek Deep Learning Processing Unit (DPU), available today as a CNN and in future also as an RNN and an MLP, delivers both unrivalled performance on an FPGA and future-proofed performance optimisation, due to the programmable nature of FPGAs. For applications which do not require the ultimate in performance, this performance advantage can be traded for significant reductions in system cost or power.

Demonstrated as a GoogLeNet Inception-v1 CNN, using 8-bit integer resolution, the Omnitek DPU achieves 16.8 TOPS performance and is able to inference at over 5,300 images per second on a Xilinx® Virtex® UltraScale+™ XCVU9P-3 FPGA. This makes it highly suited to object detection and video processing applications at the Edge and in the Cloud, such as intelligent super resolution 8K upscaling for which performance is most important. The DPU is fully software programmable in C/C++ or Python using standard frameworks such as TensorFlow. No FPGA design expertise is required.

FPGAs are being adopted as the platform of choice for many intelligent video and vision systems. They are ideally suited to Machine Learning applications due to their massively parallel DSP architecture, distributed memory and ability to reconfigure the logic and connectivity for different algorithms. To this latter point, Omnitek’s DPU can be configured to provide optimal compute performance for the wide range of neural network topologies and optimisation techniques which exist today and more importantly, the as yet unknown algorithms that will exist in future due to the significant research in this field.

Roger Fawcett, CEO at Omnitek, commented “We have a roadmap to improve the DPU performance even further through collaborative research with Oxford University on optimisation techniques, alternative network topologies and novel silicon architectures.”

Omnitek is a world leader in the design of intelligent video and vision systems based on programmable FPGAs and SoCs. Through the supply of expert design services with highly optimised FPGA intellectual property cores covering high-performance video / vision and AI / machine learning, Omnitek can provide cost-optimised solutions to a broad range of markets. To complement this business Omnitek also designs and manufactures a comprehensive suite of video test & measurement equipment.